Thursday, 24 July 2014

The de-differentiating society

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Modernity, the type of human society since the industrial revolution, was based on functional specialization - but modernity has been collapsing for a while, and a mark of this is de-differentiation: the loss of specialized functionality.

This is one way of looking at the takeover of Political Correctness in all major social domains: it is the loss of specialized functionality and the replacement of specific functionality with general political discourse across all domains.

So that mainstream churches are not about religion, they are about PC; the mass media is not about entertainment, it is about PC, the legal system is not about justice, it is about PC.

And in a very general way, functional criteria are ignored for all sorts of reasons, or no reason.

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These thoughts were brought to mind by a microcosmic incident which reflects and represent this macrocosmic situation described above. John C Wright reports

This is exactly the kind of plain, stark, straightforward corruption which goes on... well pretty much everywhere in modern life.

The rules are bent, the rules are ignored...

Now, there is a place for bending or ignoring the rules, and that is to make space for the exceptional - the off-beat, the one-off, the sui generis of exceptional merit - because if you don't bend and ignore the rules, it will have nowhere to go.

But when the rules are flouted in favour of commonplace mainstream industrious mediocrity as exemplified by the Nebula short story winner - well then this is merely arrogant corruption and deliberate destruction of function... in sum this is itself decadence, promoting of further decadence, and both a symptom and cause of decline and destruction.

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And this kind of thing is happening everywhere and on a daily basis! Public administration, science medicine, education, the arts, the military and the police...

Reducing the effectiveness and efficiency of modernity (which was bad enough!) to the lying and posturing chaos of post-modernity - a situation so completely dishonest that it denies the observable reality of destruction, even as it celebrates its own destructive motivations!